ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE COSMIC SUPERNOVA RATES

Ongoing searches for supernovae (SNe) at cosmological distances have r ecently started to provide a link between SN Ia statistics and galaxy evolution. We use recent estimates of the global history of star forma tion to compute the theoretical Type Ia and Type II SN rates as a func tion of cosmic time from the present epoch to high redshifts. We show that accurate measurements of the frequency of SN events in the range 0 < z < 1 will be valuable probes of the nature of Type Ia progenitors and the evolution of the stellar birth rate in the Universe. The Next Generation Space Telescope should detect of order 20 Type II SNe per 4 x 4 arcmin(2) field per year in the interval 1 < z < 4.